[Talk-us] Community Involvement

[Toby Murray]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 4:38 AM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> One of the goals of the chapter is collect this data and work with
> governments (and other organizations) who wish to make their data
> available to OSM.

Great!

> So, even charging isn't an awful thing, if the rest of the license is
> OK. One county near me said their data is available, but we have to
> pay $100 per DVD.
>
> Again, yes, the national chapter should be able to help with that in
> the future, either by evaluating the license and ensuring it's
> acceptable or by creating an agreement by which they donate the data
> to OSM explicitly. Then we can use it however we like.
>
> And for that, I think having an organization which can legally
> represent OpenStreetMap is valuable.

Absolutely agree. And assuming you are a not-for-profit, would
organizations be able to claim tax credit if they donate data to OSM?
I guess this probably wouldn't affect government sources so that's
another conversation.

>> It is great that we can use any tags we want. But at the same time,
>> some consistency is absolutely necessary to be able to actually use
>> the data in a global environment. Why do we all use highway=* tags for
>> roads? That wouldn't be my first impulse, for most city roads at
>> least, but we do it for consistency.
>
> The tagging is fairly consistent and there's a procedure for votes to
> be formally accepted. The WIki contains tags, and usually mentions if
> there's been a formal acceptance of the proposal or not.

It seems like I have managed to find a lot of proposals that either
were never brought up for a vote or were rejected but are still in the
wiki, cluttering things up. In general it strikes me as suboptimal to
use a wiki as a debating and voting platform. I'm not sure what would
be better though.

>> However also as a new mapper I have found it
>> difficult to figure out how to map some relatively simple things
>> "correctly." Sometimes there is nothing but a stub page on the wiki,
>> sometimes there are 2 or 3 competing proposals, all of which have been
>> idle for over a year. Several times this has led me to just "tag for
>> the renderer" since that was the most authoritative source available.
>> I have seen the same thing happening with other new mappers.
>
> What features specifically have you had trouble with?

One that I specifically remember is doctors offices. There are 3 pages
on the wiki that could apply:
- amenity=doctor (this page has a lot of detail but it was proposed in
2008 and never opened for voting. It also doesn't say anything about
how to distinguish between, say, a pediatrician and an
ophthalmologist)
- amenity=doctors (nothing but a stub)
- medical=* (recently proposed and not yet open for voting)

Now guess which one is actually used. The winner is "amenity=doctors"
- the empty stub page - with nearly 9,000 uses according to tagstat.
In fact it looks like amenity=doctor is actively being corrected to
amenity=doctors by a bot. amenity=doctors is also what JOSM uses for
the "Doctors" preset and what is listed on the "map features" wiki
page which of course links to the stub page. Personally I think the
medical=* key seems like a pretty good idea but it has 37 uses for
doctors and maybe 100 overall.


>> I firmly believe that a lot of the time "people use different tags as
>> they see fit and that's the way it should be" should really be "people
>> use different tags because they weren't able to easily figure out how
>> other people have tagged this feature." Coming up with a set of
>> guidelines would be much more appreciated and less looked upon as
>> "restricting" as some people seem to think. Look at the discussion
>> happening in the mapquest thread about state highways. No one is
>> saying "IT SHOULD BE DONE THIS WAY!" but rather "it would be nice to
>> have consensus"
>
> The wiki is supposed to be that. I've generally found (with  very few
> exceptions) that everything I needed to map was already addressed on
> the wiki.
>
> But I accept what you're saying- that it's too hard to navigate the
> wiki. You've identified a problem (and it appears others have had the
> same problem)- now it's time to take it to the next step and create a
> solution.

Yes, navigation is a pain. The "map features" page is a pretty good
index of things to map but it often links to proposal or stub pages
(like the doctors page) that don't give a lot of information about
"how to map this feature" but rather offer discussions about the tag
or some OSM jargon that is not really helpful to newcomers. The
problem is that as one gains more experience within OSM those pages DO
become somewhat helpful so there is little incentive for experienced
mappers to change them to make it better for new mappers.


Toby